Paul said you don't have to be rich. Matthew responded as if he'd said that it's not beneficial to have a safety net. That's putting a statement in to his mouth that he did not make.
Anything more than a "fuck off" from PG was charitable.
Anything more than a "fuck off" from PG was charitable.
Talking about rich people and saying "you don't have to be rich to..." is like walking into a room of black people and saying "You don't have to be white to...". Nobody there is going to think that you're talking about asians.
The statement doesn't really say anything except that 'being rich' is something that can come from some other non-rich state. It doesn't specify at what level you can be to reach that state. He could be implying that poverty is sufficient, or "middle-class" or that upper class CT is sufficient (and we don't even know if he thinks that means " rich").
It's just a complete non-statement that attempts to pander to an audience that has little choice but to misinterpret it or assume that he's stating the blindingly obvious.
Life is obviously not an equally constant struggle for everyone.
Social mobility has been declining for years.
For any individual you can create a counterfactual to suggest that their choices are what created their outcome.
However it’s also unarguable that we are not all facing the same risk/reward choices.
And of course people who take on more risk are going to fail more often. And those without a safety net will end up worse off than where they started.
It wouldn’t be risk otherwise.
However some people are proving that they don’t understand the risks other people face, and recommending that they take them anyway.
Advising someone to take a risk that you don’t understand is not leadership.
A startup is both a risk, and an opportunity.
If you incorrectly judge that risk, you have the potential to end up with fewer opportunities than before.
The poorer you are the worse the impact of this will be.
Therefore it is important for anyone, rich or poor, to have a good assessment of the risk of trying to launch a startup.
How are people who aren’t in an environment where people are succeeding supposed to accurately judge the risk of a startup when that information is not in their environment?
They clearly do need accurate information about the risks associated with startups.
It’s clearly true that it is harder for some people than others.
Arguing against this may be ‘encouraging’, but it’s also arguing against accurate risk assessment which is foolhardy in business.
If Paul Graham want to help poor people take risks, using this binary argument is not the way to go about it. He should use some of his resources to produce some realistic risk assessments so that people know what they are taking on.
I'm curious to know what risks involved in creating an startup the average person in the projects would be incapable of seeing on their own.
For what it’s worth I strongly believe that entrepreneurship should be encouraged.
I just don’t believe the way to do it is silence discussion about the factors that make it harder for people who have fewer resources.
So pg arguing that startups aren't for rich kids probably isn't just a claim that you don't need to be rich to start a startup, because that would be a response to a claim no one is making. I think this is why it's reasonable (maybe incorrect, but reasonable) for some people to infer that pg is trying to discredit the underlying notion actually meant by such claims as he referenced, which is that building a successful startup is often less of a meritocracy than we'd like to believe.
Of course we could argue all day about the nuances of each argument, and what was said versus what was meant. But we all know this is the problem with any claim made on Twitter; it invites inference, since abbreviated excerpts don't allow for proper context or dialogue.
I was poor in college like a lot of people, but I had a stable family I could rely on. I knew people who didn't have that, and they had to make very different decisions than I did. I didn't have much money in my bank account, but I was rich compared to many of my peers. No matter how badly things went for me, there was no scenario that would have left me homeless or hungry.
If PG's only point is "you don't literally need a six-figure salary to found a startup" then he's arguing against a strawman.